Voter in Eighth Texas County Reports Vote Flipping on ES&S Machine

Share

Voter in Eighth Texas County Reports Vote Flipping on ES&S Machine

Add Bexar County to the growing list of Texas counties where voters say they are having trouble with touch-screen machines flipping their votes.

A computer security expert who works for the federal government said that his ES&S iVotronic paperless touch-screen machine in San Antonio flipped his vote from Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama to Republican presidential candidate John McCain and then from McCain to Libertarian presidential candidate Bob Barr.

The voter, who asked to remain anonymous because of his government job, is an unimpeachable source, making his claim all the more credible. [Note: For readers who took issue with my use of the word "unimpeachable" here, I've addressed this in the comments posted below this post.]

He described what occurred:

I voted today (I'll be out of town on TDY Tuesday). We had touch screen machines. I pressed the box next to Obama/Biden and McCain/Palin registered on the screen. I figured I must have somehow missed the sensitive region and tried it again. Same result. So I tried voting for Barr. Same thing. I voted for McCain and Barr came up. The third time I voted for Obama, it finally took. I didn't have this problem with any of the other 11 screens of candidates/proposals (although several of them were uncontested races).

I told the old guy acting as "hall monitor" and he just shrugged.

I have no reason to suspect there's any deliberate rigging going on here, but I can't help wondering how many other people had this problem and didn't notice they'd voted for someone other than the candidate of their intention.

The unidentified woman tried to vote for Hodge three times, then called an election judge over when it wouldn't work. The judge tried the machine and it wouldn't work for him either, so the machine has been taken out of service, sealed up and stored in a bag.

Adams County uses touch-screen machines with a voter-verified paper trail that are made by Premier Election Solutions (formerly Diebold).

[REMINDER TO VOTERS: If you have problems casting a ballot, please contact us at vote@wired.com or add a report about your issue to our election map so we can track and investigate problems that come up. If you're adding a report to the map, please provide as much detail as you can to make it possible for us to verify the information. If you can provide us with your name and contact information to follow up with you and get more details, that would be even better. If you don't feel comfortable putting your name on the map, contact us at vote@wired.com.]